The United States Government has made a point, in recent years, to offer a vision for space travel in our lifetimes. Specifically, the current administration wants to set the wheels in motion that will eventually lead to a manned mission to Mars.
There is talk of such mission happening in the next 20 years or so. I believe this to be optimistic. Oh, we certainly could achieve such a goal, but the development costs needed for such a mission probably put it out of reach; at least for the moment. However, there is significant promise that a mission to Mars could be had sometime before the end of the century.
In either case, a mission of that magnitude presents challenges that are beyond anything that NASA has ever attempted. So in preparation, experiments are being conducted to systematical address these issues.
One of the most pressing issues is the psychological impact that spending a year in a half in space, in confined spaces, with five other people you barely know will have. Of course there is the added pressure of resources; rationing things like water, food and air for the duration of the journey.
To investigate these issues a project known as the MARS-500 experiment was undertaken. As the name suggests, participants spent a little over 500 days in a controlled area. They had to ration food and supplies, fix things when they malfunctioned, they even had simulated excursions on the "martian surface".
At the end of the experiment, all participants came out in excellent physical and mental health. But there were problems, it didn't completely simulate what it actual astronauts would have experienced. There would have been additional physical stress (weightlessness, exposure to higher levels of cosmic radiation) and there was also the knowledge that if anything went really wrong, help was really just outside the facility; a luxury real astronauts would not have had.
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